Cheap heroin hits British streets

Press, 28 May 1984, Page 29

Cheap heroin hits British streets

NZPA staff correspondent London A special task force has been set up to combat a startling increase in drug traffic which has led to today’s massive heroin consumption in Britain. This follows the recent influx of large amounts of the drug being dumped on to the market in Britain at very low prices. Its clientele, often young, is now established in every main British city so that, apart from being a big European depot for heroin smuggling, Britain has now become one of the major consumers. This year fears have been expressed more openly in Parliament and the medical profession that the country is “in the grip of a heroin epidemic.” Now the special force will be created with 60 officers acting as a mobile intelli-gence-gathering team based at airports and ports around

the country. This comes after a fulltime customs investigaton was set up last month in Pakistan, the main source of heroin. The customs officers’ trade union, the Society of Civil and Public Servants has attacked the Government’s moves as being too little and too late, and has said that another 500 frontline staff are needed at ports and airports. Its general secretary, Mr Gerry Gillman said, “Our claim for 500 was carefully worked out These 60 are a drop in the ocean, and they will not be enough to cope with the nation’s problem.” Last year customs officers, mainly based at Heathrow Airport, confiscated more than 200 kg of heroin with a street value of £ 20 million ($44 million). This was seen as a very small amount compared with the quantity which got through to the market

At the same time the haul represented a fivefold increase on that of 1979. Parliament has been told that Britain could have more than 15,000 heroin addicts. Giving this estimate the Home Office Under-Secre-tary, Mr David Mellor, said that the latest research by the Department of Health and Social Security in two urban areas was at least five times higher than official figures. The “flood of drugs” coming into Britain was one of the main problems discussed by police at the recent international conference on drug trafficking at Interpol headquarters in Paris. The influx of Iranians after the revolution who brought their wealth with them as heroin was cited as a main reason for the rise in drug smuggling. They were followed by people from the producer

areas, mainly in the Pakistan border regions, who, as smuggling amateurs, brought big amounts of very cheap heroin at the time when the British market was suffering a shortage of cannabis after successful customs operations. The Pakistanis account for an estimated 80 per cent of all the heroin seized in Britain, compared with a 20 per cent share of total European seizures. Customs officers maintain that drug smugglers vary enormously in age, nationality, and status so that they cannot type-cast One smuggler, later convicted, who had been stopped at Heathrow and asked why he had come to Britain said, “My sons are going to school and I’ve come to look at Harrow, Eton, and Roedean.” The most recent haul at Heathrow resulted in three Malaysians being charged with trying to smuggle

heroin with a street value of £ 2 million ($4 million). Sales of “skag” — brown heroin imported from Pakistan — have established a soaring market in what have only just been recognised as the “junkie ghettos.” These are concentrated in the vast concrete housing estates of poorer urban areas in southern London, Merseyside and Glasgow. The growth in numbers of addicts is seen mainly to have come from users who have begun trying heroin for want of other drugs. In alienated outer-city suburbs heroin is often initially taken in an Oriental manner of smoking or sniffing which is considered, wrongly, as non-addictive compared with the Western method of intravenous injection.